kwashiorkor and marasmus and lou gehrig's disease and tabes and tabefaciant

I will start with a word which introduces us to a cluster of words from which I may not successfully extricate myself in this essay. Let's begin with tabes (pronounced TA beez) which is derived from a Latin word meaning "a wasting away, consumption." It is a gradually progressive emaciation, and usually is used in combination with medical phrases such as tabes dorsalis or tabes mesenterica. As this NIH web site tells us:

"Tabes dorsalis is the result of an untreated syphilis infection. Symptoms may not appear for some decades after the initial infection and include weakness, diminished reflexes, unsteady gait, progressive degeneration of the joints, loss of coordination, episodes of intense pain and disturbed sensation, personality changes, dementia, deafness, visual impairment, and impaired response to light. The disease is more frequent in males than in females. Onset is commonly during mid-life. The incidence of tabes dorsalis is rising, in part due to co-associated HIV infection."

Just that information alone is probably sufficient to eliminate it from consideration at the Senior Spelling Bee. After all, we will be in Wyoming, and polite conversation in the Cowboy State doesn't include talk of syphilis.

Nevertheless I am now hooked by the word as well as a series of other words that the Century provides relating to the word. Let me get them out here and see what we want to do with them. We have tabescence, tabescent, tabetic, tabic, tabid, tabidly, tabidness, and tabific. Then, we have tabescence defined as "tabefaction" or "marasmus" or "marcescence." Then we have words such as Tabetic arthropathy, which was known at the time of the Century (1911) as Charcot's disease but became known in America in the last 50 or so years as Lou Gehrig's disease. Finally, there is Tabetic dementia, which is dementia complicated with tabes dorsalis. Finally, in a phrase that arrested me when I read it, from a 1681 medical treatise we have Tabes dorsalis defined as "the mourning of the chine." Let's go into a few of these.

Tabescence

The sound "esce" is one of the most pleasing ones in the English language. We have it in words such as "effloresce" or "crescent," and in those contexts it means something positive. Something that effloresces "flowers;" something that is crescent "grows." Two of my favorite English words are "effervesce" and "incalesce," the former suggesting a kind of bubbling and the latter a warming up. The kind of Latin verb from which these derive is called an inceptive or ingressive--that it, it indicates the start of or development of something. I think I like these words because they suggest a flowering, an opening, a developing, a process of living. But the "esce" can also be associated with devolution as well as evolution, with degeneration as well as generation. This is how the word tabescent is used. It suggests the gradual, irreversible and hopeless process of muscular and nerve degeneration.

Marasmus, Marcescence, Marcid

These three words appear in the Century's definitions of tabes and related words. Marasmus is one of the saddest words in the English language, even though no one knows it. Does not knowing it make the sadness less? Well, marasmus is derived from the Greek word for wasting away, and it usually associated with malnutrition and those haunting images we have all seen of starving children in Third-world countries. Used as early as 1574 in English, marasmus is defined in the OED as "Originally: any wasting disorder. Now: severe loss of body weight, spec. that caused in children by protein-energy malnutrition." One medical dictionary defines marasmus as "wasting away, as occurs with children who have kwashiorkor. Also called cachexia, is usually a result of protein and calorie deficiency."

So, as I am writing, I am coming face to face not only with real human problems but with life-sapping realities in our own day. What is the ethical responsibility of the speller, the lover of words, who has now come upon words that trigger images so powerful and debilitating that the images won't go away? Staying in the realm of words alone can be a very comforting experience, because you only have to glide along in life on the surface of things, skimming across the fascinating or interesting realities as if they are inland lakes on which you are water-skiing. But then you run into a word like marasmus, and you are brought back from mental vacations.

There are all different levesl of malnutrition or "wasting," and the OED informs us that kwashiorkor (a native name in Ghana--formerly the Gold Coast) is caused by an insufficient intake of protein by the body and chiefly affects children in tropical countries, "producing apathy, oedema of the extremities, desquamation, and partial loss of pigmentation...and leading in severe cases to death." The term was introduced by British physician Cicely Williams in 1935, and the explanation given by Williams of the development of the disease is as follows. When a second or subsequent child it born into the family of the Kwa culture, the earlier child no longer eats from the mother's breast and therefore begins to eat a different diet. Often this different diet is poor in the amino acids supplied by mother's milk and rich in carbohydrates. Kwashiorkor, whose most prevalent sign is a swollen abdomen, is a Kwa word meaning "the one who is displaced," and points to the disease suffered by the older child who must "make room for" his/her younger sibling.

I really need one more essay to bring me back to the dictionary, as I explore some of these other terms.

1913